The Importance of Daily and Weekly Planning

As a self employed mother of a toddler, I fully understand the value of planning. My busy life puts me in the position where daily and weekly planning are essential to create enough time to spend with my son while still succeeding in my home based business. I plan my days and weeks carefully to include time for my family, business and health concerns. This allows me to create a clear path for myself that maintains a healthy balance of work and play. In this article I will share with you the reasons why daily and weekly planning is so important and I will also give you some of the strategies that I use for achieving my goals. As a self employed mother of a toddler, I fully understand the value of planning. My busy life puts me in the position where daily and weekly planning are essential to create enough time to spend with my son while still succeeding in my home based business. I plan my days and weeks carefully to include time for my family, business and health concerns. This allows me to create a clear path for myself that maintains a healthy balance of work and play. In this article I will share with you the reasons why daily and weekly planning is so important and I will also give you some of the strategies that I use for achieving my goals.

The following points demonstrate why planning is so critical to success.

Planning can greatly reduce your stress quotient. Proper planning gives you the peace of mind of knowing that you have formulated a feasible plan of action and that your goals are attainable.

Planning also helps you to be prepared for obstacles because part of the planning process is creating a contingency pan for unexpected problems.

Planning serves as a way to evaluate your progress as you work. Planning your daily and weekly activities will clearly illustrate whether or not you are staying on schedule.

The following tips will provide you with strategies to implement your planning to achieve your goals.

The first step to planning is to clearly define your goals. Taking a few minutes to put your goals into writing will be very beneficial in helping you to plan for your success.

Once you have defined your goal, it is time to brainstorm on the tasks that are required to complete your project. Ordering all of the necessary tasks into a logical order and assigning an estimated time for completion to each goal will be beneficial when you begin scheduling these activities.

Next it is useful to define the roles that you will take in fulfilling your goal as well as the roles of any others who will be assisting you. This is important because you can use this time to determine who will handle certain tasks to avoid redundancy.

Once you have determined your goal, the tasks required, the key players and the tasks they will complete, it is finally time to start your scheduling. When scheduling it is important to plan a weekly schedule as well as a daily schedule. The weekly schedule is important for the overall success of the project but it is the daily planning that will help you to track your progress and determine whether or not you are on schedule. Try using significant project milestones in your weekly planning but for daily planning break each milestone down into the necessary components and plan the completion of those components on a daily basis.

As the project progresses, continually evaluate your performance to determine whether you are on track or need to adjust your schedule. This is where daily planning becomes so important. Take a few minutes at the middle of the day and at the conclusion of the day to evaluate your progress and make adjustments as necessary.

Finally once you have successfully completed your project review your planning process to determine how successful it was. This will help you by illustrating whether or not you have achieved an optimal planning system or whether you need to more carefully plan subsequent projects.

In my life, I can clearly see how planning is beneficial to my success. When I have a plan to follow I am able to track my progress against the plan to determine whether or not, I am on the path to success or not.